Stress — AQA A-Level Psychology
Test yourself on Stress with AQA A-Level practice questions.
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Stress explained
Acute stress triggers the sympathomedullary (SAM) pathway: the hypothalamus signals the adrenal medulla to release adrenaline, initiating the 'fight or flight' response like increased heart rate.
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Chronic stress activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) system: the hypothalamus releases CRH, prompting the pituitary to release ACTH, which stimulates the adrenal cortex to secrete cortisol. Cortisol provides sustained energy via glucose release but suppresses immunity. Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) models these physiological changes across three stages: alarm reaction (SAM activation), resistance (HPA activation), and exhaustion (depleted resources causing illness).
The role of stress in illness, including reference to immunosuppression and cardiovascular disorders.
The link is not magic; it is cortisol. Sustained cortisol reduces lymphocyte production and blunts natural killer cell activity, so infections take hold. Kiecolt-Glaser took blood from seventy-five medical students a month before exams and again during them: natural killer activity fell in the exam sample, furthest in students also reporting loneliness. Her wound-healing work found biopsy wounds in carers of relatives with Alzheimer's took roughly nine days longer to close than in matched controls. On the heart, repeated adrenaline surges raise blood pressure and scour artery walls, encouraging plaque and clotting; Williams found the angriest of thirteen thousand adults were about two and a half times likelier to have a heart attack. All of it is correlational, and stressed people also smoke and sleep badly.
Sources of stress: life changes and daily hassles. Workplace stress, including the effects of workload and control.
Two rival accounts of what wears people down. Holmes and Rahe argued it is major change, desirable or not: they scaled forty-three life events in life change units, anchoring marriage at fifty, so bereavement of a spouse scores a hundred and divorce seventy-three. Rahe then found only a weak correlation, around 0.118, between units accumulated and later illness in US sailors. Kanner countered that the daily grind matters more, and his hassles measure outpredicted life events for psychological symptoms. At work two things bite. Johansson's Swedish sawmill finishers, machine-paced and isolated, showed adrenaline far above baseline and more absence than cleaners; Marmot's Whitehall civil servants showed low job control, rather than sheer workload, tracking heart disease.
Measuring stress: self-report scales (Social Readjustment Ratings Scale and Hassles and Uplifts Scale) and physiological measures, including skin conductance response.
Two ways to put a number on stress, each carrying the other's weakness. Self-report asks the person. Holmes and Rahe's scale lists forty-three major events, the respondent ticks those experienced in the past year, and the life change units are totalled, high totals meaning raised illness risk. Kanner's scale instead samples the previous month's small demands and pleasures, each rated for frequency and severity. Skin conductance measures the body: two electrodes pass a tiny current across the fingertips, sympathetic arousal opens the eccrine sweat glands, and conductance rises within seconds. The trade is objectivity against meaning. Self-reports are retrospective and open to social desirability; conductance cannot tell stress from excitement, a warm room or caffeine.
Individual differences in stress: personality types A, B and C and associated behaviours; hardiness, including commitment, challenge and control.
Why the same pressure floors one person and not another. Friedman and Rosenman interviewed around three thousand Californian men and sorted them by manner: Type A competitive, time-urgent and hostile, Type B relaxed and tolerant. Eight and a half years later, of the 257 who had developed coronary heart disease, roughly twice as many were Type A. Later work narrowed it: hostility, not hurry, does the damage. Temoshok's Type C suppresses anger to keep the peace and is linked, far more weakly, to poorer cancer outcomes. Kobasa found executives who stayed well under heavy strain scored high on three Cs: commitment to what they do, seeing change as challenge not threat, and a sense of control. The categories are crude, the samples male, and hardiness may just be tagging optimism.
Managing and coping with stress: drug therapy, stress inoculation therapy and biofeedback. Gender differences in coping with stress. The role of social support in coping with stress; types of social support, including instrumental, emotional and esteem support.
Stress management uses biological and psychological methods. Drug therapies like benzodiazepines reduce brain arousal, while beta-blockers lower heart rate. Stress Inoculation Therapy (SIT) is a cognitive approach where patients conceptualise stressors, learn coping skills, and apply them. Biofeedback uses operant conditioning, allowing individuals to monitor and control physiological states like muscle tension using technological signals. Coping shows gender differences: males typically use 'fight or flight', whereas females often use oxytocin-driven 'tend and befriend' strategies. Social support mitigates stress via instrumental (practical help), emotional (empathy), and esteem support (boosting confidence).
Your focus
- Describe the sequence of events in the sympathomedullary (SAM) pathway and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) system.
- Explain the physiological functions and consequences of cortisol release during chronic stress.
- Outline and evaluate the three stages of Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS).
Show all 25 objectives
- Explain how sustained cortisol suppresses immunity through lymphocyte numbers and natural killer cell activity.
- Describe Kiecolt-Glaser's exam and wound-healing studies and state the direction of each finding.
- Explain the cardiovascular route from repeated adrenaline surges to artery damage, plaque and clotting.
- Apply the indirect behavioural route to explain why a stressed smoker's illness may not be immunosuppression.
- Evaluate the stress-illness link given correlational evidence in which illness may precede the stress.
- Describe the Social Readjustment Rating Scale, using marriage at 50 and bereavement at 100 to explain life change units.
- Explain why Kanner argued daily hassles predict psychological symptoms better than discrete life events.
- Explain how Johansson's sawmill workers and Marmot's civil servants separate workload from job control.
- Apply the control finding to explain why a junior employee may be more at risk than a busier senior one.
- Evaluate life events research using retrospective recall coloured by current illness and Rahe's correlation of 0.118.
- Describe how the Social Readjustment Rating Scale and the Hassles and Uplifts Scale differ in content and time window.
- Calculate a respondent's total life change units from a year of ticked events and state what a high total predicts.
- Explain how skin conductance measures sympathetic arousal through eccrine sweat gland activity between two electrodes.
- Evaluate self-report against physiological measures, weighing social desirability against a lack of specificity.
- Describe the components of Type A, Type B and Type C personality and the behaviour that marks each.
- Explain Friedman and Rosenman's prospective design and the doubled coronary heart disease rate in Type A men.
- Explain hardiness by saying what commitment, challenge and control each mean rather than listing them.
- Apply the finding that hostility is the pathogenic component to judge which Type A person is most at risk.
- Evaluate personality type research using male American samples and categories imposed on continuous traits.
- Compare the mechanisms and effectiveness of drug therapy, stress inoculation therapy, and biofeedback.
- Explain biological and psychological gender differences in coping with stress.
- Identify and evaluate the roles of instrumental, emotional, and esteem support in managing stress.
Stress exam tips
Marking Points
- Outline the SAM pathway for acute stress, detailing the roles of the hypothalamus, sympathetic nervous system, and adrenal medulla.
- Describe the HPA axis for chronic stress, specifying the sequence of CRH, ACTH, and cortisol release from the adrenal cortex.
- Explain the dual role of cortisol in providing sustained energy for the stress response while simultaneously suppressing immune function.
- Detail the three stages of Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS): alarm reaction, resistance, and exhaustion.
- The mechanism first: chronic cortisol suppresses immune function, reducing lymphocyte numbers and natural killer cell activity.
- Kiecolt-Glaser's medical students, with the direction of the finding stated: natural killer cell activity was lower during exams than a month before.
- The wound-healing study on carers, where healing took around a quarter longer than in controls.
- The cardiovascular mechanism: raised blood pressure and heart rate, damage to artery linings, plaque formation and increased clotting.
- Cohen's common cold study, where a higher proportion of the high-stress group developed colds after controlled exposure to the virus.
- AO3: the evidence is correlational, so illness could precede or cause the stress rather than follow it.
- AO3: the indirect behavioural route, since stressed people smoke, drink, sleep less and eat worse, which confounds the direct immune explanation.
- Life changes explained as readjustment: any change, positive or negative, uses up adaptive resources, which is why marriage sits on the scale alongside bereavement.
- Named values from the scale to anchor the answer, and the weak size of Rahe's naval correlation.
- Daily hassles as the rival account: minor, repeated irritations accumulate and predict symptoms better than discrete life events.
- Workload evidence: Johansson's sawmill finishers, whose repetitive machine-paced work produced raised adrenaline, more illness and more absenteeism than cleaners.
- Control evidence: Marmot's civil servants, where the lowest grades with least job control had the highest cardiovascular risk.
- AO3: the data are correlational and often retrospective, so recall of life events may itself be coloured by current ill health.
- AO3: individual differences in appraisal mean the same event carries a different weight for different people, which a fixed score cannot capture.
- Self-report defined by what it depends on, the person's own account, with the life events scale summing units across a fixed recent period.
- The hassles and uplifts measure described by its content and window: everyday demands and pleasures over the past month, rated for frequency and severity.
- Skin conductance explained mechanistically: sympathetic arousal increases eccrine sweat gland activity, which raises conductance measured between two electrodes.
- Its strengths stated as objectivity, speed and freedom from demand characteristics.
- AO3: self-report is retrospective, so recall is imperfect, and socially desirable answering distorts reports of drinking, arguments and coping.
- AO3: a fixed score assumes an event means the same to everyone, which appraisal research contradicts.
- AO3: skin conductance lacks specificity, since arousal from excitement, heat or caffeine produces the same trace, so triangulating it with cortisol and self-report is stronger than either alone.
- Type A broken into its components, competitiveness, time urgency and hostility, with Type B as the relaxed, tolerant contrast rather than a stress-free person.
- Friedman and Rosenman's prospective design: a large cohort of men classified by structured interview and followed for years, with Type A showing about double the coronary heart disease rate.
- The refinement that hostility is the pathogenic component, so the original package was too broad.
- Type C characterised by emotional suppression, compliance and difficulty expressing anger, associated with poorer cancer prognosis.
- Hardiness with each C explained, not merely listed: commitment as involvement, challenge as construing change as opportunity, control as belief in personal influence over events.
- AO3: the classic samples are male, middle-aged, white-collar and American, so generalisation beyond them is unsafe.
- AO3: types impose categories on continuous traits, and hardiness measured by self-report overlaps with neuroticism and negative affectivity.
- Explain how drug therapies manage stress, distinguishing between central effects of benzodiazepines and peripheral effects of beta-blockers.
- Outline the three phases of Stress Inoculation Therapy (SIT): conceptualisation, skills acquisition, and application.
- Describe the process of biofeedback, including relaxation training, feedback from monitoring equipment, and operant conditioning.
- Discuss gender differences in coping, contrasting the male 'fight or flight' response with the female 'tend and befriend' response.
- Differentiate between instrumental, emotional, and esteem support, providing a clear example for each type.
Examiner Tips
- 💡Use the acronyms SAM and HPA to structure your answers, but always write out the full terms at least once to demonstrate clear understanding.
- 💡When evaluating GAS, use evidence from animal studies but explicitly mention the limitation of extrapolating these physiological findings to humans.
- 💡Clearly distinguish between the physiological effects of adrenaline, such as increased heart rate, and cortisol, such as glucose release and immune suppression.
- 💡Use the figures. A stated percentage or a stated number of days is credited where a vague claim that more people got ill is not.
- 💡Application items put a character under a deadline or in a caring role, so name the measure and the study that fits that scenario.
- 💡For evaluation, the third-variable lifestyle confound and the difficulty of measuring immune function are the two strongest lines available.
- 💡Application items describe a job, so decide whether the stressor is workload, control, or both, and say which before evaluating.
- 💡Discuss questions reward setting life events against daily hassles as competing explanations rather than describing each in turn.
- 💡Attach at least one figure or named sample to each study you use; it is what separates a top band answer from a vague one.
- 💡Questions commonly want one strength and one limitation of each type, so plan them in pairs rather than emptying everything about one measure first.
- 💡If the stem names one scale, criticise that scale specifically rather than self-report in general.
- 💡The word objective in a stem is a signal to bring in physiological measurement.
- 💡Scenario questions hand you a character sketch, so quote the detail from the stem that identifies the type before you name it.
- 💡If asked to evaluate hardiness, the narrow sample and the reliance on self-report are the two safest and quickest criticisms.
- 💡Do not open by defining stress. The marks sit on the individual differences, not on background.
- 💡When evaluating stress management techniques, compare drug therapy with SIT or biofeedback in terms of side effects, cost, and long-term effectiveness.
- 💡Use concrete examples when defining types of social support, such as giving someone a lift to the hospital for instrumental support.
- 💡Be prepared to apply your knowledge of coping strategies to a novel scenario by identifying which type of social support or therapy is being used in the stem.
Common Mistakes
- Confusing the adrenal medulla and adrenal cortex; the medulla is involved in the SAM pathway releasing adrenaline, whereas the cortex is part of the HPA axis releasing cortisol.
- Stating that the SAM pathway is for chronic stress; correct this by specifying that SAM handles acute or immediate stress while HPA manages chronic or long-term stress.
- Claiming exhaustion in GAS is just feeling tired; clarify that exhaustion refers to the depletion of physiological resources, leading to stress-related illnesses.
- Writing that stress causes illness when the studies are correlational or quasi-experimental and cannot show causation.
- Claiming stress always weakens immunity. Brief acute stressors can temporarily boost immune activity, so the relationship is not a straight line.
- Naming Kiecolt-Glaser without saying which way the result went, which earns no credit for the finding.
- Treating immunosuppression as just meaning catching colds, instead of a measurable change in immune cells.
- Explaining cardiovascular damage as stress hormones being toxic, rather than through blood pressure, vessel damage and clotting.
- Saying the life events scale measures bad events only. Marriage, holidays and promotion are on it because the theory is about change, not misery.
- Reporting the Whitehall finding backwards as senior managers being the most stressed. Control protects, so risk was highest at the bottom.
- Quoting a correlation of around 0.118 as though it were strong evidence.
- Blurring hassles into life events. Hassles are ongoing daily irritations; life events are discrete changes in circumstance.
- Discussing workplace stress only as too much work, and never mentioning control.
- Saying skin conductance measures stress directly. It measures sympathetic arousal, of which stress is only one cause.
- Classing the life events scale as a physiological measure because it predicts physical illness.
- Losing the time frames, which differ: the life events scale covers months, the hassles measure the past month.
- Writing that self-report is subjective and stopping there, without naming the cost as recall error, social desirability or differing appraisal.
- Praising physiological measures as fully objective while ignoring baseline differences between people and the diurnal rhythm in cortisol.
- Listing the three Cs as bare words. Challenge must be explained as viewing change as an opportunity rather than a threat.
- Saying Type A causes heart disease, when the evidence is a prospective correlation and hostility accounts for most of it.
- Presenting Type C as an established cause of cancer, which the evidence does not support.
- Describing Type B as experiencing no stress, rather than responding to it differently.
- Confusing hardiness with simply being resilient, without naming the three components AQA specifies.
- Confusing emotional and esteem support; emotional support involves empathy and listening, whereas esteem support specifically aims to increase a person's sense of self-worth and competence.
- Describing biofeedback merely as relaxation; correct this by emphasising the use of monitoring technology and operant conditioning to gain voluntary control over involuntary physiological processes.
- Assuming gender differences in coping are purely social; ensure you mention the biological basis, such as the role of oxytocin in the female 'tend and befriend' response.